Keystone XL prompts ‘unprecedented’ Sierra Club decision to break U.S. law

It bills itself as “America’s largest and most influential grassroots organization.” And the 121-year-old Sierra Club, founded by the famed 19th-century California conservationist John Muir, is also the world’s prototype environmental group, born out of battles to save the colossal Pacific Coast redwoods and create America’s earliest national parks.

Now, in what’s being described as an “unprecedented” moment in an organizational history that encompasses landmark fights to protect the Grand Canyon, block nuclear power projects and preserve millions of hectares of pristine wilderness, the Sierra Club has formally decided to engage in its first-ever act of civil disobedience in a bid to stop one of Canada’s biggest economic development projects: TransCanada Corp.’s construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to pump oil-sands petroleum from Alberta to refineries in the U.S.

“For civil disobedience to be justified, something must be so wrong that it compels the strongest defensible protest,” Michael Brune, Sierra Club’s San Francisco-based executive director, announced Tuesday following a meeting of the group’s board of directors to consider the “one-time use” of illegal action to oppose Keystone XL, the proposed conduit for what club president Allison Chin called “the dirtiest oil on Earth.”

“We are watching a global crisis unfold before our eyes, and to stand aside and let it happen – even though we know how to stop it – would be unconscionable,” added Brune.

Brune told Postmedia News the club’s decision reflected a belief that U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders “need a wake-up call” about the seriousness of the climate-change threat to the planet and the need for action, especially in a year of “record droughts, record wildfires and unprecedented storms” in the United States.

“To expand the tar sands takes us rapidly in the opposite direction,” he said.

Obama, who will make the ultimate decision on the fate of the pipeline after Nebraska’s governor, Dave Heineman, announced his state’s approval this week of a new route for Keystone XL, is the chief target of the planned Sierra Club protest next month.

Details of the action are being closely guarded to preserve the “element of surprise,” the club’s national spokesperson, Maggie Kao, told Postmedia News. She would only say the planned act of civil disobedience, to be organized in collaboration with the U.S.-based climate-change action group 350.org, would take place in February.

“You can understand the sensitivity around an action like this,” said Kao. “We can’t really divulge a lot of the details too far ahead of time.”

TransCanada president Russ Girling welcomed Nebraska’s green light for the Keystone XL project on Tuesday, insisting that the Canadian company has carefully balanced the needs of the environment with the benefits — to both the U.S. and Canada — of moving forward with the massive energy project.

“Over the past year, we have been listening to Nebraskans as we worked to identify a new route for the Keystone XL Pipeline that avoided the Sandhills, protected sensitive areas and addressed as many concerns as possible,” Girling said in a statement. “The (state’s environmental assessment) process has clearly taken into account the input from Nebraskans and today’s approval of the Nebraska re-route by Governor Heineman moves us one step closer to Americans receiving the benefits of Keystone XL – the enhanced energy security it will provide and the thousands of jobs it will create.”

Jane Kleeb, founder of the action group Bold Nebraska, which opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, said the group is working with the Sierra Club.

“People are now willing to risk arrest because it is that serious for folks, right, that we believe that this project is that much of an injustice.”

She also would not unveil the exact protest action planned but said one action will happen in front of the White House Feb. 13, with 50 people involved.

A wider public demonstration, not involving civil disobedience, could involve up to 20,000 people on Feb. 17.